Essential Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading (with poll)

[Paul_C]

M John Harrison - Light / Nova Swing / Empty Space

Hannu Rajaniemi - The Quantum Thief / The Fractal Prince / The Causal Angel

 

[J-Sun]

I agree with Randy about the essential natures of representative collections by many authors. The Ballantine/Del Rey "The Best of" series is the best, IMO, but Pocket has a series, UK publishers have them, Ace and DAW did "Worlds of" and "Books of," Tor has some "Collected Stories of," etc. So consider all those to be listed below and I'll just mention some individual collections along with the novels. I think the "essential SF" library should also include things like The Hugo Winners (winning short fiction in nine volumes covering 1955-1993 or so) and the SFWA SF Hall of Fame three volume set.

• Poul Anderson - Brain Wave, Tau Zero
• Greg Bear - Blood Music (as a measure of my on-topicness, I'm not listing Queen of Angels )
• Alfred Bester - Starlight (adding the best single-volume collection to Randy's Demolished/Destination)
• Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451 (adding to Randy's titles)
• Fredric Brown - What Mad Universe (adding to Randy's collection - note that Brown has a BDR TBO but From These Ashes is his complete speculative SF in one volume)
• Algis Budrys - Who?, Michaelmas (adding to Extollager's Rogue Moon; his three main collections are The Unexpected Dimension, Budrys' Inferno, Blood and Burning)
• Octavia E. Butler - Bloodchild and Other Stories (collection)
• Arthur C. Clarke - Childhood's End, The Deep Range, A Fall of Moondust (adding to Silent Roamer's Rendezvous with Rama)
• Pat Cadigan - Patterns
• Hal Clement - Mission of Gravity
• L. Sprague de Camp - Lest Darkness Fall
• Lester del Rey - "Nerves" (which is not in his TBO but is in the SFWA Hall of Fame - or its expansion, Nerves, which is fine, but the novella is better)
• Philip K. Dick - Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik (adding to Extollager's A Scanner Darkly, which I haven't read)
• Greg Egan - Diaspora, (his three main collections are Axiomatic, Luminous, and Oceanic)
• Harlan Ellison - probably The Essential would get it but obviously some collection or collections (such as Alone Against Tomorrow and Deathbird Stories)
• Robert L. Forward - Dragon's Egg
• William Gibson - Burning Chrome (adding an essential collection to Randy's Neuromancer)
• Joe Haldeman - I'm not aware of a retrospective and, while good, maybe every collection of his isn't essential, but None So Blind and A Separate War are especially strong (adding to Randy's The Forever War)
• Robert A. Heinlein - a juvenile (or all of them - Starman Jones is a (perhaps sentimental) favorite), Starship Troopers, Double Star, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (adding to Randy's The Past Through Tomorrow and Pyan's Stranger in a Strange Land)
• Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed (adding to Extollager's Earthsea stuff (does nothing for me personally but I agree it's considered a fundamental work) and Randy's The Wind's Twelve Quarters)
• Fritz Leiber - Gather Darkness, the Lankhmar (Fafhrd/Grey Mouser) saga (adding to Randy's titles - I'd like to add a lot more, such as Destiny Times Three and You're All Alone but I doubt those really qualify consensus/history-wise)
• Katherine MacLean - The Diploids (a collection and arguably not consensus/historical "essential" but I think a strong case could be made that it ought to be and that I'm not being purely subjective there)
• Jack McDevitt - A Talent for War
• Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants
• Mike Resnick - Kirinyaga (collection of connected stories usually considered a novel)
• Rudy Rucker - Software
• James H. Schmitz - The Witches of Karres, the Telzey Amberdon/Hub saga
• John Shirley - the Eclipse trilogy (not sure about his collections; I've read Heatseeker and The Exploded Heart)
• Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside, Lord Valentine's Castle (he has a pair of Pocket TBOs but Beyond the Safe Zone and Secret Sharers (1992 Spectra edition only) are better choices, as they collect a huge percentage of his 70s and 80s stories - and he had multiple "Complete Stories" series for some reason)
• Doc Smith - Skylark, Lensman sagas
• Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron, The Iron Dream, The Void Captain's Tale (probably his most important collections are The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde and No Direction Home although some - not me - might argue that The Star-Spangled Future should supersede both)
• Allen Steele - Orbital Decay, Sex and Violence in Zero-G (connected collection)
• Bruce Sterling - Schismatrix (almost everything, really; Sterling's essential collections are The Crystal Express, Globalhead, and A Good Old-Fashioned Future)
• Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human, The Dreaming Jewels, innumerable collections
• James Tiptree, Jr. - I'm not sure if a retrospective covers her since her first four collections (Ten Thousand Light Years from Home, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, Star Songs of an Old Primate, and Out of the Everywhere) are so good - I also like her first novel, Up the Walls of the World, but doubt it's consensus/historical "essential."
• A.E. van Vogt - Slan (not his best, actually, but historically famed), Voyage of the Space Beagle (fixup), Weapon Shops and Null-A books (not sure of a good retrospective; some of van Vogt's best short fiction appears in Destination: Universe and Away and Beyond)
• Jack Vance - The Dying Earth, The Languages of Pao
• John Varley - he's had a couple of retrospectives come out which may be almost complete; otherwise, The Barbie Murders, Persistence of Vision, and Blue Champagne are essential collections.
• Vernor Vinge - The Peace War duo and at least the "Deepness" duo
• Jack Williamson - Darker Than You Think, The Humanoids
• Roger Zelazny - This Immortal, Lord of Light (adding to Silent Roamer's "Amber" (the first five books of which, again, didn't impress me though I'm willing to give them another try someday and grant that they are huge; also almost any Zelazny collection such as Four for Tomorrow, The Doors of His Face, My Name Is Legion, The Last Defender of Camelot, and Unicorn Variations)

 

[J-Sun]

Can you compare it to Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar? (I've read neither.)

Not Pyan but, for what it's worth, Zanzibar won a Hugo and Make Room was only nominated; both are considered important works but Zanzibar definitely seems to get more praise/attention. That said, I found Zanzibar to bury what might have been a good, strongly plotted, focused work in a bunch of extraneous material, exacerbated by copying Dos Passos' collage-method of presenting a multimedia work in print - snippets of newspaper clippings, interviews (IIRC), etc. Basically, it was just a bulky, unfocused novel and I didn't like it. Make Room isn't flawless in that regard, being written in chunks (I can't remember if it's technically a fixup but there are definite "parts"). However, it does a much better job of keeping its eye on the ball, telling a concise and coherent story in which I felt more involved with the characters and the setting. Both books, like most other books from the time and on the topic, feel a bit dated but I don't think that should really be held against them. Another work (also not entirely cohesive from being an actual fixup and even more dated with its emphasis on sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll in addition to dystopian overpopulation but full of offsetting virtues) is Robert Silverberg's The World Inside. It's somewhat well-known and respected but probably not as much as the other two, but it may be my favorite of the three. I'm not sure any of them are especially essential, though.

 

[BionicGriff]

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone, I've gotten far more then I was expecting.

I mentioned this briefly in a previous comment, but my next step is going to be figuring out a way to put all of these suggestions into some sort of poll or survey. Hopefully I'll then get enough people from the forums to come in and place their votes with the ultimate goal of compiling a final list of X number of books making the...

Unofficial (Official?) Chronicles Essential Reading List *insert fanfare here*

(I don't think I've been around long enough to 'Officially' name something after the Chrons, I'll wait for the blessing from someone else), or if someone comes up with a better name that's cool too, I'm open to suggestions.

I'm going to start researching how to create the poll tomorrow, I'm thinking I might just follow suit with the anonymous writing challenges. I'll put together one clean, master list of all the submissions, and people could just email me their X number of submissions (X will be determined once I see just how many total we are dealing with) Once I get that poll/survey figured out I'll make a last call for suggestions before placing it.

Thanks again for all the submissions everyone, I'm looking forward to how this plays out.

 

[psikeyhackr]

These three books have all been mentioned but not deliberately in relation to each other.

You gotta check out The Big Three so compare them in the Moon:

A Fall of Moondust (1961) by Arthur C. Clarke
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) by Robert Heinlein
The Gods Themselves (1972) by Isaac Asimov

Three men in the Moon?

Clarke does technological rescue, Heinlein does social revolution and Asimov does alien physics.

psik

 

[TheDustyZebra]

You can make a poll in a thread here -- it sounded like you might be thinking of an outside source, so I thought I would mention it. Check with Ursa about how to make sure you have enough slots for everything. I don't remember the details on that.

 

[BionicGriff]

You can make a poll in a thread here -- it sounded like you might be thinking of an outside source, so I thought I would mention it. Check with Ursa about how to make sure you have enough slots for everything. I don't remember the details on that.

Yes, that would be preferable. I wasn't sure of its capabilities. I'll look into making it here first. Thanks.

 

[hitmouse]

A few years ago we had threads on "best of" 50s, 60s, 70s, which were summarised by the OP. Not sure who was responsible for that: J-Sun possibly. Those produced some good lists.

 

[Extollager]

Keith Roberts' Pavane seems to be mentioned quite often in such lists, but I haven't read it.

 

[hitmouse]

Pavane is excellent. Alt history where the reformation never happened and engines are heresy. Set in Dorset, around Corfe Castle, if I recall.

 

[J-Sun]

A few years ago we had threads on "best of" 50s, 60s, 70s

Yep: 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s.

 

[Extollager]

Hitmouse, I'll have to take my copy of Pavane out of storage. Maybe this 500th anniversary year of the 95 Theses would be a good time to read a novel with this theme!

 

[BAYLOR]

The Reefs of Earth by R A Lafferty

 

[BionicGriff]

Yep: 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s.

Aha, I figured someone had to have done something similar at one point. For your polls, did you basically just go through the thread and count the number of mentions, or did you actually have an legitimate poll that people took?

 

[BAYLOR]

The Malacia Tapestry by Brain Aldiss

 

[J-Sun]

Aha, I figured someone had to have done something similar at one point. For your polls, did you basically just go through the thread and count the number of mentions, or did you actually have an legitimate poll that people took?

True, it's similar but there may be other threads that are more similar. The decades thing only covered the 50s-80s and was done on a "handful of works of a decade" basis where yours covers everything and can include an indefinite number of works from whatever era. Anyway, yeah, I just tallied up the items in people's posts using those as the poll, basically. It would be interesting to see the results from this thread/poll - I suspect there would be similarities but also differences.

 

[BionicGriff]

Sounds good, thanks for the input. I'm going to go ahead and get a an poll put together using everyone's submissions, I meant to have this ready already but I haven't had the time yet, it will take a bit of time entering all of these submissions into the poll, but I think the more options to choose from the better.

 

[clovis-man]

The Moon Pool, The Metal Monster, The Ship of Ishtar , Dwellers in the Mirage all by Abraham Merritt
More Than Human , The Dreaming Jewels, Some of Your Blood all by Theodore Sturgeon
When Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer and Phillip Wylie
After Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer and Phillip Wylie
Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein

Ah, you saved me from putting in these old chestnuts myself. All worth a read or a re-read.

 

[BAYLOR]

The Napoleons of Eridanus by Pierre Barbet

 

[BionicGriff]

(Edited poll instructions into the first post, deleted them here.)